Advancing the State of Knowledge in Electronic Records

2007 Electronic Records Research Symposium

On November 16, 2007, the NHPRC ERR Fellowships program will hold a
symposium in the Pleasants Family Room in Wilson Library at UNC Chapel
Hill.

The 2006-2007 Fellows will present the results of their research for
symposium participants.

William Wallach from the Bentley Library at the University of Michigan
will discuss the Research Fellowship Program for the Study of Modern
Archives (RFPSMA), administered by the Bentley Historical Library of the
University of Michigan and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
1983-1998, and Joan Krizack from Northeastern University will speak about
the NHPRC Electronic Records Research Fellowships when they were centered
in Boston, 2001-2004. Dr. Paul Conway will conclude the symposium with an
analysis of the accomplishments of the Fellows and the program from
2004-2006 while it has been hosted at SILS.

We are pleased to announce that our keynote presentation will be given
by Reagan Moore and Richard Marciano from the San Diego Supercomputing
Center. They will speak on "The Evolution of Data Curation: Towards
Policy-driven Collection Management."

Abstract: Preservation can be thought of as communication with the
future. We know that the future will use new storage systems, new
representation information, and provide new services. Preservation is also
the management of communication from the past. We want to make assertions
about authenticity, integrity, and chain of custody based on prior
management policies. Policy-driven collection management such as the
integrated Rule-based Data system (iRODS) addresses both challenges. The
iRODS data system implements data curation processes as micro-services that
can be migrated to new storage systems over time. iRODS implements
management policies as rules that control the execution of the
micro-services. The rule system can be updated dynamically, can be tuned to
express each community's management policies, and enforces periodic
validations of assertions about collection properties.

Reagan Moore is Director of Data Intensive Computing Environments group
at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He coordinates research efforts in
development of data grids, digital libraries, and preservation
environments. He developed software systems, including the Storage Resource
Broker data grid and the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System. Supported
projects include the National Archives and Records Administration's
Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype, the National Science
Foundation's National Science Digital Library persistent archive, the
California Digital Library Digital Preservation Repository, and the
Worldwide Universities Network data grid. An ongoing research interest is
use of data grid technology to automate execution of management policies
and validate trustworthiness of repositories.Moore has been at SDSC since
its inception in 1986, initially being responsible for operating system
development. Prior to that he worked as a computational plasma physicist at
General Atomics on equilibrium and stability of toroidal fusion devices. He
has a Ph.D. in plasmaphysics from the University of California, San Diego,
(1978) and aB.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology
(1967).

Richard Marciano is Director of the Sustainable Archives and
LibraryTechnologies (SALT) Laboratory and Lead Scientist in the DICE group
(Data Intensive Computing Environments) at the San Diego Supercomputer
Center (SDSC), at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He is also
an Affiliated Professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Program in the
Division of Social Sciences, and founding member of the Regional Workbench
Consortium (RWBC) at UCSD. The SALT Lab is an interdisciplinary unit
focused on developing information technology strategies and conducting
research in the area of digital materials & records collection and
preservation. Marciano's interests are with data management, digital
archiving, and long-term preservation. Current research projects include
PAT (Persistent Archives Testbed), eLegacy (preservation of geospatial
data), T-RACES (cyberinfrastructure for the humanities), WRAP (preservation
workflows for digital video), informatics for urban planning
environments,and the NARA research prototype persistent archives. Marciano
holds degrees in Avionics and Electrical Engineering (National School of
Civil Aviation, Toulouse, France), M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from
the University of Iowa, and worked as a Postdoc in Computational
Geography.